2 - The grateful dead: Corneille's tragedy and the subject of history

Summary

Le passé est le lieu d'intérêt et de plaisir qui situe hors des problèmes présents du prince, du côté de l'“opinion” et de la curiosité du public, la scène où l'historien joue son rôle de technicien-substitut du prince.

(M. de Certeau, L'Ecriture de l'histoire, p. 17)

Although Corneille entered the tragic universe through the door of myth (Médée), his great tragedies, those plays that in his own time set him apart from his contemporaries as the creator of a new, powerful dramaturgy, are firmly rooted in history. Le Cid, Horace, Cinna and Polyeucte, despite the obvious differences in their plots and dramatic peripeteia, are all subtended by a historical imperative, a recourse to history as the impetus and motivation of tragic mimesis. In Corneille's plays the imbrication of history and tragedy forms a locus of overlapping, and at times contradictory, forces that circumscribe the emergence of the Classical subject. This subject, in turn, is implicated in the forms pleasure and power take in Cornelian dramaturgy as it reflects and traces the parameters of the nascent Absolutism of seventeenth-century France.

The Cornelian gesture of tragic “translation” from the universe of myth to the world of history is significant in its own right. Could we not see in this shift that initial move separating what J.M. Apostolidès has, following contemporary sociological discourse, described as the distinguishing feature of two types of societies, “those without history and those with access to historical understanding”?